Tag Archives: #edcmooc

By demonstrating that you could build a very “open” course on Coursera, the University of Edinburgh team in charge of E-learning and Digital Cultures succeeded in breaking down some walls between the large-scale free course (called xMOOC by some critics) and the cMOOC connectivist learn-fest.

How did that happen?

Incubating a community: Long lead-in time for the learning community. This made the community ready to go at the start of the course and the early birds in the community were very open and welcoming

Course subject: reflecting on learning and being human in relation to technology. It was learning about learning and the affordances of the Internet for learning. The fact that this course was built on a MOOC platform associated with “just free” open courses, was a nice demonstration in overcoming technological determinism (technological determinism was a subject in the first week).

Organization of the contents: a short-film festival each week, with related readings, accompanied by clear instructions on what was considered to be “core” material and what was additional. Encouraged to do your own thing with the contents.

Organization of the interaction: very loose. Create your own blog and add your feed to the aggregator. Use the hashtag so everything is findable across different platforms. Participate as much as you want, where you want, no need to use the coursera forum.

The instructors were there, in the forum, commenting on blogs, responding on Twitter. In their second Google Hangout (they did two), they discussed, among many other things, their strategy on teacher presence. Christine Sinclair mentioned, for instance, that she felt like participating in a student group, but that she did not want to barge in as a teacher.

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It is a good season for “MOOCs”, Massive Open Online Courses, and you can spot several of them in full action. But the term “MOOC” has come to cover a range of wildly different kinds of ehm… learning events. Indeed, for some of these, “course”, might be the wrong word.

It will probably not be long before we will start to use different words for different kinds of MOOCs.

Later, the term was applied to free courses that were instuctor-led and structured around canned lectures and one course platform, but the need was felt to distinguish between the merely “free” courses and the courses with distributed contents, and matching leaner-centered approaches to the organization of the course. In came the distinction between cMOOC and xMOOC. But that good vs. bad model is not very useful to describe the range of approaches that exists.

Lisa Lane came up with three kinds of MOOCs, which are loosely divided by the dominant goal (they all have networks task and content).

Network based (the connectivist approach with a big role for community and content created by the learners, for instance CCK12)

Task based (developing a skill by doing, like the digital literacies course DS106)

The content based kind of MOOC, is less about exploring new pedagogies and more about exploring new business models for higher education. Lisa Lane puts the big course platforms (Coursera, Udacity, edX) squarely in the content based category. And she laments the way “MOOC” has become a label for straightforward up-scaled instructivist courses. (http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/11/five-short-years-to-mooc-corruption/)

But with EDCMOOC, the E-Learning and Digital Cultures course run by the University of Edinburgh on Coursera, you get a hybrid kind of MOOC with a big learning community that has organized itself outside of the course platform, months before the MOOC-part of the course had even started. Students are free to use the course platform for discussions, or to use their own choice of social platform. The only assignment is a peer reviewed final digital artefact. The content of the MOOC is also encouraging dialogue and reflecting on the affordances of online education, in the best of the connectivist tradition.

On the other hand, it does latch on to a course taught in Edinburgh, it is not a coreless MOOC (how Alex Couros planned the Educational Technology MOOC, ETMOOC).

It is not the course platform that determines the type of MOOC , it is the “design” or set-up of the MOOC and the organisation of its contents and interactions.

I am still looking for a better way to describe the different kinds of MOOC. If I find one, I’ll post it here, promise. The kinds of online learning events or sites that are being called a “MOOC” are so different, that we really need a new set of labels. Right now, we have one big term for things that resemble online unconferences and game-ified language learning programs. “MOOC” is such a catchy name that the press is slapping it on every big and free online course, but we need a better definition based on a set of attributes that goes beyond goals. And I don’t think a MOOC typology based on business models is what I’m looking for… Some elements that can lead to a better “grid” of MOOCs are:

Is there a strong core, a simultaneous for-credit course, for instance, or is it a donut-shaped cloud of dots (sorry, but you get my drift)?

Is it a learning event with a start date for interactions between a group of people who follow the same “course”, or can a learner start a sequence of learning packages anytime (Like Duolingo or hackdesign.org)?

What is the rythm of the introduction of new subject matter? (2 weeks in etmooc, which is nice)

Are there different paths possible: strong engagement/weak engagement?

Ever since the course on Coursera officially started, the Google+ and Facebook groups have been hit by a tidal wave of new members. It’s more important now than ever to make decisions about my own focus and filters.

I would really like to find a cluster of like-minded souls in the #EDCMOOC cloud! Do give me a shout in the comments, Google+ or on Twitter.

My learning goals:

Use a set of interesting tools and theories surrounding digital culture(s)

Be part of a sustainable learning community

Learn about learning

Figure out the principles at work in MOOC

My interests, as far as MOOCs are concerned:

Learning design, instructional design, MOOC design

Connectivism, connected learning, learning communities

Digital Humanities

Higher Education

State of affairs in the big European e-learning projects and in particular in Belgium, France and The Netherlands

Digital literacy

My contribution:

Creating images and mash-ups

Layout

HTML and CSS

Figuring out blogs, feeds and Twitter

Languages: Dutch, French, English, in no particular order

Historical perspective (check out my “about” page)

Currently, I’m keeping track of #EDCMOOC through:

Coursera

Google+

a blog post here and there (Hoping to narrow it down to a personal selection matching my interests)
For instance, Chris Swift’s Blog is interesting to keep up with the EDCMOOCcommunity: http://mybackyard78.blogspot.co.uk/

#edcmooc on Twitter

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The #edcmooc starts in a week, and already it gathers a lot of attention. Some participants have been busy gearing up as early as three months before the kick-off, and words like “keeping up” and “overwhelming” flow by on the Google+ stream. It feels a little like embarking on a journey, only to find out it is actually a race, and people have already started running. (One MOOC survival tip pops into my mind: pace yourself.)
But what else to expect of a massive open online course that aims to reflect on elearning? It is very “meta”, very buzzable, and perfectly able to throw its participants in a recursive loop of massively tweeting about the massive amounts of tweets generated about the buzz around this course that hasn’t started yet. (Except that it has started of course.)

“Massive” stands for the scale, a MOOC is open to an indefinite amount of students, and that can mean a positively huge amount. At this point the number of students registered for the EDCMOOC has reached the 36 000 mark, and counting. Instructors cannot possibly keep track of the amount of interactions and content produced by tens of thousands of students, so students organize themselves, turning a myriad of social platforms into their learning environment.

“Open” says that there is no pay wall, registration process or other impediment to entering the course. Open also refers to a certain absence of a fixed path or strong guidance from an all-seeing, all-knowing teacher. Descriptions that pop up are “edupunk”, or “DIY learning”. It is “open” as in open door, but also as in open source.